On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 12:37 PM, Tom Marble <tmarble(a)info9.net> wrote:
An example of [wdiff] is:
$ w3m -dump 'http://www.datomic.com/datomic-free-edition-license.html' >
datomic-free-edition-license-dump.txt
$ w3m -dump 'http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/legalcode' >
cc-by-nd-30-dump.txt
$ wdiff -n cc-by-nd-30-dump.txt datomic-free-edition-license-dump.txt > datomic.wdiff
While that is readable I'm not aware of tools that can take wdiff
directly as a "patch". Typically the patch tool requires a
"unified" diff:
[...]
So I think it would be nice if we had a patch tool that could take
wdiffs
as we could use it to stage file changes (git commit). Alternatively if
we could convert a wdiff to a unified diff then we could use the conventional
patch tool. Alas one such tool, unify [3], isn't functional yet.
[...]
That has been on our radar for a while now, and is in fact a big part
of the reason I started working on wdiff in the first place. My
larger goal was to add hooks to a VCS that would allow it to properly
store ODF files (so that one could diff/merge/etc. in meaningful
ways), and similar formats that are effectively a bunch of zipped text
files with long lines. The other part of that project is reversible
decompression (producing a compressed file that is bit-identical to
the original given only the extracted contents of the original and
perhaps some necessary extra metadata), which still requires a lot of
work. I mention that larger goal as it is related to this
already-off-topic thread (hopefully related enough so as not to be
doubly-off-topic).
I don't spend much time on wdiff anymore, but I suspect that the new
primary maintainer (Martin von Gagern) would appreciate knowing that
there is still interest in this. The wdiff mailing list at
wdiff-bugs(a)gnu.org is probably the best contact method.
Denver
http://ossguy.com/